Now waiting for my sis to 'warm up' before we can leave at 10.15am....

We had one bigshot coming down from NY to visit the Singapore office. She gave quite a long talk on CSFB becoming ONE bank, ONE CSFB. Of course, how does that impact IT? Apparently, there are gonna want to review methods to merge different IT architectures from CSFB and CS to form ONE model. Seems damn high level ya, nothing concrete. But of coz directors all speak like that. Go so high level till its so high that we can't see the ground. lol

What i made out of it was, integrating their PeopleSoft Financials system to the same model. Don't think i will bring in all the details. For those who don't know abt PeopleSoft, to put it simply, its something like SAP.

We all went to Harry's after that. A pub at Esplanade. Had drinks, chats, food. And best moment of the night was, my boss said that he wanted to 'book' me. Asking me to come back to Credit Suisse when i graduate. Ha! Felt honoured that he looked so highly upon me. hehehehe

There was another guy from Controllers IT leaving us to go to Controllers. The place where i realli wanna go. Not IT support or development, but to do the real finance stuff! And of course all its but a dream, if from Controllers you can actually go be a trader!

Ok enough of CSFB. Preparing for later in the afternoon where YF join in SF for 2nd anniversay preparations. Surely goodness and mercy, shall follow me...

holdlocks

tx #1begin transaction
/* acquire a shared lock and hold it until we commit */
1: select col_1 from table_a holdlock where id=1
2: update table_b set col_3 = 'fiz' where id=12
commit transaction

tx #2begin transaction
1: update table_a set col_2 = 'a' where id=1
2: update table_c set col_3 = 'teo' where id=45
commit transaction

Penning down my experiences

Think now that i am experiencing a particular interesting period of my life,
i should pen it down in words so that i can look back at it in future years and recollect the happ moments.

I do not care abt the audience or readership of this blog. Think i should just express my thoughts once in a while.

And really if anyone do reads any of the articles, i hope that it would only input something postive into the reader's mind.

Cheers,
Jason

The trading floor

Anyone been to a trading floor?

Well i am fortunate enough to visit CSFB's trading floor.
First Impressions, the floor isn't like what you see on drama serials with a crowd of people standing, shouting and hand signals in one lump. Its more of people being computers, phones, and occasionally stand,shout, hand signal.

First trader i met, a woman named Yuki Hamasuki. She was conversing in japanese but she can speak perfect accented english too. Way cool... I later found out that she was the MD for FX trading. Power... She went through briefly what her department does and of coz, little of it went into my mind as i could hardly the financial jargon and theories that are involved.

After that, met those who trade bonds. An indonesian girl, Sherly, was previously from the Operations dept (middle office) was a trader there. She too spoke perfect accented English. Traders are reall client focused people and with that, you need good communications skills to communicate to your clients. Especially so when you handle billions of dollars everyday.

Met a few more other traders but the above mentioned 2 were those that left the deeper impressions.

Traders, earn a hell damn lot but the conseqences of a slip up is just too high. Guess that's why i would not want to become a trader. What's a slip up? Having your fears realized in a speculation. Lose a hell lot of money. Money that you can only see in the form of numbers on screens. No physical dollar notes or gold bars. Just too huge an amount.

Of coz, traders have short working lifespans and definitly do not have a good work life balance if any at all. Sometimes we really got to ask ourselves, is this really what i want? Or is there a further cause that i want to fulfill in life.

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